CHE Training - Day 2

Pastor Kamau shared a story about a Dr. Akili, who returned to his village after medical school to serve the people of his community. His desire was to share the love of Jesus with each person who came to him for medical treatment. He became so popular that the queues became longer and longer every day. In his effort to take care of each patient, he began to spend less and less time with each one. Soon he eliminated sharing the Gospel with his patients, therefore abandoning his original vision to help his people both physically and spiritually.

As an exercise to see if we could "help" Dr. Akili shorten his queues Pastor Kamau first passed out a hypothetical medical problem that could occur - I received a mother with a baby who could get diarrhea...
...then he placed on the floor a paper house, Dr. Akili's clinic, and an immunization center...
...in turn, we each carried our potential 'patients' to one of the papers depending on whether we felt the malady could; either be treated at home or prevented at home, required a visit to the doctor, or required an immunization to prevent.



...we were amazed to discover that most of the potential illnesses could either be prevented or treated at home, thus solving Dr. Akili's dilemma and restoring his vision to help his people both physically and spiritually by giving him more time with fewer patients. A significant component of the CHE program is to empower the people of a community with the knowledge to help prevent diseases, promote good health and to have an abundant life in Christ.
Next we 'relaxed' by playing a game introduced by our 'energizer' Robert. One side of the room wrote an answer beginning with the word "because" and the other half wrote a question beginning with the word "why" (neither group knew what the others were writing)...we alternated with the questions and the 'answers' with some very fun and funny results!
...then an energizer game that was more physical...they were always fun...
...and provided comic relief...like the goofy look on Paul's face here...

...in this one we are to line up according to birthdays, but without speaking - so we had to signal to each other the month and day we were born...and we were 100% successful! Good group!
...here we are all lined up (well most of us...January and February would not fit in the picture)
Mrs. Kamau then introduced the topic of the Elements of CHE and their roles...after sharing with us a story to illustrate the need for a program like CHE in a community, we discussed the three elements: Training Team (TT), Committee (Comm) and the Community Health Evangelists (CHE's). Briefly, the TT is made up of 3 or 4 people who enter into a community to determine if a CHE program could be successfully launched. They have been trained on what to look for and how to discover the information needed.
Once they are satisfied a successful CHE program can be implemented they meet with key leaders in the community to mobilize and help inspire a vision of transforming the community. A Committee is then selected from among the citizens of the community. Once the Comm is trained they select people from the community to be trained as CHE's. The CHE's become active in the community by making home visits and helping to implement projects to meet key needs in the community. The Comm encourages and works closely with the CHE's as well as working to determine the most pressing needs of the community. The TT stays in a community for 4 to 5 years, encouraging and supporting the Comm and helping to train local Trainers with the idea that the outside TT will be replaced by a local TT and the program will be 100% community run. That is the very short version of an overview of the CHE program!

Below you see Eddy setting up our next group exercise designed to help us learn how a Comm works to determine the most pressing needs of a community. His lesson was entitled "Needs and Resources of the Community. That is masking tape on the floor and he is writing the numbers 1 thru 10.
With Bryan's help (I love it when he is brought to his knees!) we came up with 8 pressing needs in the Mathare community. Each of us had three objects representing three votes.
We were instructed to put one, two or all three objects on the need(s) we found most pressing...
...then Paul helped with counting the votes for each need to determine their hierarchy of urgency. In this way we (as the Comm) know which need(s) to target first.
Eddy taught us that every problem has two sides - like the two sides of a coin - on one side is the problem and on the other side are the resources to solve the problem. We then broke into groups to answer the questions: 1. What people are available in the community to help solve the problem? 2. What materials are available locally that can help solve the problem? and 3. Where and how can money be found to help solve the problem? Each group took one question and it was amazing how many local resources we discovered!

Bryan was our next teacher as he used the story of the Paralytic whose friends lowered him through the roof to get him to Jesus for healing in his lesson entitled "The Paralytic and Development". We learned key principles about working in a community, among them are; people must acknowledge they have needs, they must believe the needs can be met, they must discover that there are local resources available to them, they must be able to identify the needs and then mobilize and cooperate to solve the problems.
Kelly, his helper and wife, assisted by writing the key points on the flip chart.
Are you exhausted yet? I can hardly believe we covered so much material in just two days! And - while were being taught key concepts and elements of CHE we were also being taught the methods of CHE, which is heavily based on the philosophy of ownership and community participation in the process.